John Kessel

Okay, so the way that the MFA was structured, there was always a genre person.

So John Kessel founded MFA.

And so he was regularly the genre person.

And then all the other faculty was literary.

towards literary most of the time.

Yeah.

But because of John Kessel being there, it brought in genre writers and really quite...

Kij Johnson came out of NC State and Alyssa Wong came out of NC State.

I tried to go to state in about 13 years ago, I guess, and get in the program.

And John Kessel wrote me.

He wrote me a personal email saying that they'd cut back the number of students they could take, and I was not one of the ones.

So I ended up going to Stone Coast at University of Southern Maine.

Right, no.

No, and so I have to say that part of what the inspiration for this was was my John Kessel and my Tachyon books.

So these were books that were making an argument.

And so in order to make this book make an argument, I put in several arguments, several actual essays about this is what I read when I was thinking about, and this is what I think is happening right now in robots.

I was lucky, very fortunate to start working at the Vadagas Project where those journals were being produced.

Working for Dr. John Kessel, Dr. Rick Hendricks, Dr. Meredith Dodge, Larry Miller.

I was an amazing expert learning paleography, how to read the old documents, learning research, editing, translating, transcribing.

And so that got me on the road.